The All India Power Engineers Federation (AIPEF) on Thursday extended its support to farmers' agitation and urged the central government to scrap the recently enacted farm laws. 'AIPEF fully supports the struggle of farmers and urges the central government to scrap the farming laws recently passed in Parliament and protect the power subsidy of farmers by withdrawing the Electricity Amendment Bill, 2020, and standard bidding document,' said V K Gupta, spokesperson of the federation, in a statement.

The struggle of farmers is against the economic policy of the central government which is to favour the corporates and industry leaders to maximise their trading business and profit at the cost of the farming community, he added.

Shailender Dubey, chairman AIPEF, said in the statement that the power engineers of the country had strongly opposed the proposal of the government to eliminate subsidy in electricity tariff, and in particular the proposal to finish the present electricity subsidy being given to farmers was strongly opposed.

While the central government has proposed the procedure of DBT (Direct Benefit Transfer), this amounts to snatching the subsidy of free power to farmers, the statement said. The proposal of DBT would lead to huge economic hardship to the farmers who would have to pay the electricity bills of their tubewells to the discoms while there was no guarantee of matching DBT payments by the state government. The Electricity Amendment Bill, 2020 must be withdrawn, it added. The present move of the government to introduce and implement the farm laws is a part of the overall strategy of the present central government to introduce privatisation at every step which amounts to practically selling the country bit by bit, it stated. Gupta further said that the move to implement the farming laws in the name of economic reforms will actually give huge trading benefits to the corporates and economically destroy the farmers who will be deprived of due revenue from marketing of the food grains etc.

The policy of the NDA government to benefit corporates will not only destroy agricultural activity, it would also compromise the food security of the nation, it added. PTI KKS MKJ